My best friend [after Woody] died three weeks ago but I haven’t been able to write about it in my blog. I tried to write a poem about her last week, but it didn’t work yet. But I do feel ready finally to deal with it here. Elise and I met in 1977 in the Feminist Writers Guild. At that time I was still in an open relationship with Robert. I had met Woody the year before and was involved with him. Elise lived in Cambridge. I was spending two-three days a week in Cambridge in a commune where I had a little room up on the third floor. Of course when she came to visit me, Robert went after her, but she wouldn’t even flirt with him. She was always loyal that way and in so many other ways. We worked together for a time and after the Guild disintegrated, we remained close friends. After Robert left me for another woman with a lot more money, when Woody and I had decided to be monogamous, we still went into Cambridge a lot and rented a room from Elise near Central Square. She always liked to visit me on the Cape, one of her favorite places. Elise generally worked as a fundraiser. She had artistic ambitions and I have a couple of her paintings on wood. She got on well with Woody. Elise was attracted often to powerful men who were sometimes married, always about to leave their wives, or single but often looking as Robert had for someone of higher status who would bring them money or more power or connections. She had several long term relationships but never married. She used to come here to Thanksgiving and to Pesach as well as staying with me in July. After she moved to New Jersey when her father developed Parkinsons and needed to be taken care of, she could uaually come only in July. When Woody was a selectman, we gave a large summer party – up to 85 people. It was a garden party and Elise and I did the cooking although people brought some dishes and some wine or beer, much of which we also provided. It was a lot of work, but for many years I enjoyed it and Elise was a great help as she could cook well. We had fun in the kitchen together, planning and making a feast. Elise could mingle with just about any group of people. She got to know many people around here. She loved to go gallery hopping in Wellfleet and in Ptown. Three and a half years ago, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Most people die of it quickly, but she fought it and she insisted on living the life she wanted. She traveled a lot, a sort of ongoing bucket list. That included political involvement in Trenton, where she had bought a row house in a predominantly African American neighborhood. She made close friends there, was elected president of the neighborhood association and also got involved in city politics. She organized art exhibits and traveled to France, Italy and England as well as enjoying New Orleans. Elise had always had a troubled relationship with her mother although she was close with her brother and second sister-in-law as well as her sister and brother-in-law and their children. Elise and her mother worked out a much closer relationship in her last years. I took the train to Trenton to see her and also Woody and I visited when I had gigs in New Jersey. She was planning to come up for what would have been next weekend. For her birthday in late May she had asked me for guidebooks to Paris and Morocco, maps and I also gave her a phrasebook for Moroccan Arabic. She planned to travel in the fall.  Suddenly she began to cough violently and could not eat. It turned out the cancer had metastasized to her lungs and throat. She died two weeks later. She fought till the end, but when she was told she would go into a coma and a vegetative state, she said, “Turn off the oxygen” and died fifteen minutes later. Her sister and I will put together a memorial here on the Cape in September. She requested her ashes be put into the ocean off Cape Cod, the place she loved best. I think we may do it from Ramon’s boat – he’s a ship captain and has done memorials before. I miss her and I know next weekend is going to be hard as she would have come up here Thursday and stayed until Monday. It will be the first summer since 1977 we have not spent at least part of July together. She was a very dear and close friend and a courageous woman, as well as remaining beautiful till the end. She had an Italian Madonna face, very Renaissance, oval and symmetrical. She wore her dark brown hair short and had lovely skin. But it was for her courage and her loyalty that I cherished her.